Re: flavours of LaTeX
Stefan Schwarzer wrote:
>> I've two Debian boxes. One one (sarge) it appears that `latex` is really
>> `e-TeX` whereas on the other (unstable) it appears that `latex` is
>> really `pdfeTex`. It must have been like this for a while and I've not
>
>> appears that 'e_TeX' will read in .eps files but 'pdfeTex' won't..
>
>> tell me if it's brief!) about (a) how these happen to have been set up
>> differently, (b) how to change one so that both are the same.
>
> In my case (more or less etch, tetex 3.0-21), latex points to pdfetex as well.
> As I understand, the mechanism is more or less the following. There is
> a generic 'tex' program which will load different 'formats' or 'flavors' of
> tex (latex, pdftex, plain tex, ...), basically corresponding to some set of
> compiled macros which with the help of the generic 'tex' program are able
> to produce device independent intermediate
> output - dvi in the old days, dvi or pdf nowadays. The 'format' is derived
> from the name that the generic 'tex' program has been invoked with.
> The generic 'tex' program seems to be called pdfetex nowadays.
>
> When 'latex'ing a file, the latex-format loads additional
> style/class/macro definition files according to
> rules laid out in (/etc/texmf/)texmf.cnf. The tetex-suite depends on
> the kpse... commands to interprete this file. kpsewhich can be used to
> check whether and where a particular style/class file will be found or not.
>
> .eps input is processed by one of the style files, typically graphicx.sty
> or epsfig.sty for figures. Knowledge about .eps input is transfered to the
> device independent file using a \special macro. The dvi-output of
> that macro is left for interpretation to the programs that actually produce
> output or that convert into printable formats (dvips, xdvi, ...). When
> invoking pdflatex, .eps input may not appear in the pdf-output file (at least
> this was the situation about 2 years ago). For these 'tex flavors' it
> was necessary to provide the pictures themselves in pdf format.
>
> I'll stop babbling now - hope that helps in diagnosing the situation
>
>
That's right, use eps pictures for dvi and ps output. If you plan to run
pdftex to produce a pdf file, your picture has to be a gif, jpeg, png,
pdf or metapost picture.
latex always produces dvi. If you include the graphicx package, tell it
to use a driver (dvips for postsript, pdftex for pdf) and the image
inclusion will do what it has to do. On the web you can find macros that
automatically execute the right code. See
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/ifpdf.html and
the graphicx package documentation for more info.
Success!
Sjoerd
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